Stoned on Highmayne
Hey err’body, I’ve managed to get my Bachelor’s degree and have been celebrating with a bit of Duelyst for a little while. I’ve been sauntering over to Gold with some fun decks, and I’ve been playing a bit more with one of my old standbys that I’ve updated for a little show-and-tell for your enjoyment. It’s been doing fine so far but Silver’s not exactly a litmus test for quality (at least not consistently) but I’m a sucker for tribal decks so I thought I’d share it anyway. Here you go:
Strategy
As you can tell, this deck is pretty simple. You fight for tempo. If you get it and keep it, you win! The Lyonar Golem strategy revolves around amplifying established minions to generate large amounts of damage from cheap but well-statted bodies. The way you win is by keeping one or two bodies alive until your next turn so you can buff them up and do a lot of damage.
Components
The Golem Package (Celebrant, Metallurgist and Warblade) lets you hit the board very hard and very fast. P1T1 likes a Celebrant or Metallurgist open into two more minions on P1T2. P2T1 likes Metallurgist on Manaspring + Metallurgist + Warblade (with option to drop an Alchemist on another spring) or Celebrant (walk onto mana) + Metallurgist on Spring + Warblade for overwhelming tempo on T1.
Alchemist, Judgement, Sentinel and Immolation are partly control tools, but also most of your amplifiers. You can use Judgement or Sentinel to finish off a low-Health enemy minion (without triggering on-damage effects!) or pump up one of your own for that bit of extra face damage. Alchemist is great for Artifacts and Eggs, but is also a great Manaspring denier that prevents your opponent from ramping. P2T1 Alchemist into Sentinel will destroy most of your opponent’s opening minions, no sweat. Later in the game you can smash EMP to recover from a stall or to break Provoke locks that prevented you from closing (and doubles as Artifact-hate).
Lifestream and Oath are your reload tools. Oath is obviously great, but I also like Lifestream because it’s a great trading tool but also allows you to selectively refill your hand in a useful way. For one, you tend to go down to three cards or less very quickly, and extending your resources until you have the mana spare to cast an Oath is valuable. But, for two, it’s also great for making your opponent believe you’re going to do one thing, and then doing another. I find this is especially great with Sentinel.
That brings us to the remaining amplifiers (buffs). Argeon’s Roar BBS and Sol Pontiff round out our suite of attack buffs which all work wonders on low-Attack Golems like Celebrants and Warblades (which don’t buff themselves). Most opponents don’t worry about those utility bodies right away, but they realise their mistake when they suddenly turn into beaters on a dime.
I haven’t mentioned Boulder Breacher and Vanquisher yet. The Breacher is an insane swing card whenever it goes off; not only maintaning your own board and Health, but netting you a respectable 5/5 body to boot. Punching into a Claws-out Vaath has never felt good, until now. Finally, Vanquisher is something of a tech card that prevents the opponent from playing out their turn the way they want. Songhai players hate getting stuck in particular, but nobody likes it. It does have slighly weak 2/4 stats though and I haven’t yet experimented with Ghoulie in its place yet.
Notable Exclusions
I ended up excluding all the vanilla Golems because immediate impact is more important than raw stats. I kept Brightmoss Golem the longest, but I noticed I kept replacing it for the Breacher so I cut it. Divine Bond is a natural fit for a deck like this, but the Health of my minions isn’t high enough to really capitalize on it and I have Judgement and Sentinel to effectively do the same job already. Fealty was another consideration but I too frequently start turns with only 2 minions and you need at least three to push it over Oath. Lightbender might be cool for earlier Dispel tech but I haven’t found I miss it thusfar. My Golems are better at destroying things than disabling them anyway.
Pro tip: Prioritize keeping your cheap Golems alive over doing chip damage early on. It’s not worth losing a Bond-enabler for only 2-4 damage when you could be saving it for amplified damage a turn later! You will find yourself regularly holding an attack or two in the first two turns of your matches so your 2/3 doesn’t become a punchable 2/1 (exceptions apply, of course).
And that’s it! How are you doing nowadays?
Cheers.
